Monday, January 21, 2013

Colors of the weekend

All weekend, anywhere you went in Baltimore, you saw purple and only purple. Either we're collectively choosing to ignore Pantone's color of the year (Emerald Green, if you're curious), or we're one loyal city to our football team. I've talked before about my love of football, and how it's more a love of being a fan, and being part of a team... but I have to say, watching the way the Raven's were portrayed on tv last night - dirty and gritty underdogs represented by Ray Lewis' zany, unpredictably crazy personality versus Tom Brady's boy-next-door approachable charm - I realized why I love my city. We aren't perfect, and we aren't always the loveable guy - but Baltimore knows who they are.
As an artist and a self employed designer, I find myself struggling with who I am on a regular basis. What part of my work do I focus on? Should I try to come off as more edgy? Be less personal with my marketing? But Baltimore knows exactly who they are. They are a team who doesn't win easily, who makes plenty of mistakes before clawing back for wins in the second half. We aren't the pretty-faced, silver-spooned, popular guy, we're the scrappy, hilarious, hardworking rule breaker, who will wear our uniforms in girl colors and we will look approximately 100 times as terrifying in purple as your team in red & blue. This is because we lean down and eat pieces of turf from the playing field as we walk in and we wear 100 times as much eye black as your team. In fact, we bought out the makeup aisle at CVS in your hometown so you had to cut out little stickers to put under your eyes instead.
Being from New England, my family is always asking who I'll be routing for when the Pats play the Ravens. This is an easy decision for me because I didn't learn to love football until I moved to Baltimore, so I've only ever routed for the Ravens. That said, I embrace my roots in New England. It's a place full of kind, loyal, honest people who are, I will add, far tougher than ANY of us when it comes to things like the weather (Did you see coach Belichick? he didn't even wear a coat to the game last night!) and on occasions when I feel I've lost my sense of self, I find myself most when I think about New England, not Baltimore. Wouldn't it seem fitting that this purple I'm wearing these days is composed by mixing the colors red and blue? Not to mention, in terms of color mixing, Baltimore is just a pre-mixed smoothy of patriotism. If you don't see the colors of the united states in our jerseys on this MLK/Inauguration day... well, you must not have gone to art school. They teach this stuff in color theory, Check your Pantone guide.